User Research, Design Methods, Education

Reactive Views are the big thing in the Applications-with-JavaScript field. Applications-with-JavaScript are mostly slightly more interactive Web pages. The basic idea is that, when you change the underlying data (Let’s say a username), the library figures out how to update what you see on the screen.

The big player in the filed is react. There are tons of components out there and a big ecosystem.

But the new world includes a lot things that where not that pervasive in JavaScript before. Programming in react (and many of other newer libraries) need a toolchain now. This can be difficult. One example is the prototyping environment for react (this means: change some code, see if it does what you want, repeat): A live-in-the-browser transpiler used to be included or so; then they switched to babel, then babel dropped their browser support, then someone somehow managed to provide a browser based tool for this again etc.

So before you start learning react, you need seemingly to learn how to use and configure webpack and babel and how to write ES2015. It may be great if you program 8h a day.But it is also new barrier, demotivating (learn x and y before you can do z!) and I might learn some statistics instead.

Anyhow, for now I started to learn vue.js Vue is far smaller than react. It's ecosystem is smaller, too. It demands less tools. Let's see how this journey continues. I sometimes miss jQuery.